Microeconomics: Competition, Conflict and Coordination

Samuel Bowles and Simon Halliday

2022-08-09

Book Cover Book Cover

“Most of the people in the world are poor, so if we knew the economics of being poor, we would know much of the economics that really matters …”

Introduction

Samuel Bowles and I (Simon Halliday) have recently published our intermediate microeconomics textbook: Microeconomics: Competition, Conflict and Coordination (henceforth CCC).

  1. Interactive ebook: If you would like to, you can register for an inspection copy of the interactive e-book here: global.oup.com/academic/product/microeconomics-9780198843207 You can see the button for “Request inspection copy” on the right-hand side of the page.
  2. Open PDF: You can see a PDF of the final publication version of the PDF of the book here: simondhalliday.com/microeconomics/bowleshalliday_final_2022.pdf. For legal reasons, I must include the following statement about the open PDF. “This PDF version of the book lacks the interactive features of the e-book available at www.vitalsource.com/en-uk/products/microeconomics-samuel-bowles-simon-d-v9780192581297?term=9780198843207 and is made available free of charge for individual use under a CC BY-NC-ND license.”
  3. You can buy a copy of the book at a reputable retailer near you, or online through a variety of retailers, including modern monopolies like Amazon, e.g., www.amazon.com/Microeconomics-Competition-Coordination-Samuel-Bowles/dp/0198843208.

Supplementary content for CCC

What are the flavors CCC?

MBIE, 2006, PUP MBIE, 2006, PUP

Though written for undergraduates, in content CCC has a strong flavor of Sam’s graduate-level textbook, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution published by Princeton University Press in 2006. As an advanced text, though, it is not suitable for many undergraduate classes because of the high level of the math and certain other aspects of its theoretical rigor.

Example page: figure in Chapter 6 on Economies of Scale and the Production Possibilities Frontier Example page: figure in Chapter 6 on Economies of Scale and the Production Possibilities Frontier

CCC would also be an excellent follow-up text for introductory economics courses that use the The Economy produced by the Curriculum Open Access Resource in Economics (CORE Project) directed by Wendy Carlin and of which Sam is a co-author. CORE’s The Economy is based on many similar themes to CCC.

What are the themes of CCC?

We cover many of the standard economic concepts taught to second-year or intermediate-level economics students including constrained optimization, opportunity costs, trade-offs, complements and substitutes, Nash equilibrium, Pareto efficiency and risk.

But many of the themes of the book are unlikely to be encountered in most intermediate microeconomics texts.

Provenance

It’s hard to know exactly where your own ideas come from, but for us, those implicated certainly include:

We incubated many of these ideas at the Santa Fe Institute (where Sam serves on the faculty), a center of interdisciplinary and dynamic problem-centered modeling.

Contents

Below is an abridged table of contents for the book. Currently the first ten chapters are available for distribution with chapters 11 and 12 under active revision over the summer. We plan to have a final part, Part 3, which will go into greater depth on advanced topics, such as the fundamental welfare theorems (and criticisms thereof) and a final reflection on the institutions of capitalism. You can access a more comprehensive draft table of contents here.

Chapter Title
Preface -
Part I People, Economy & Society
1 Society: Coordination Problems & Economic Institutions
2 People: Preferences, Beliefs & Constraints
3 Constrained optimization: Doing the Best You Can
4 Property & Exchange: Mutual Gains & Conflicts
5 Coordination Failures & Institutional Responses
Part II Markets for Goods and Services
6 Specialization, Production & Exchange
7 Market Demand
8 Minimizing Cost & Maximizing Profit with Imperfect Competition
9 Competition, Rent-Seeking & Market Equilibrium
Part III Markets with Incomplete Contracting
10 Information: Contracts, Norms & Power
11 Jobs, Unemployment, & Wages
12 Interest, Credit & Wealth Constraints
Part III Economic Systems: Ideal & Imperfect
13 A Risky & Unequal World
14 Perfect Competition & the Invisible Hand
15 Capitalism: Innovation & Inequality
16 Public Policy & Mechanism Design

Calculus and Graphics

We use calculus in the book, but almost all of the calculus is contained in boxes (M-Notes). We try to follow Alfred Marshall’s maxims with the mathematics:

Alfred Marshall, 1906, Letter to Arthur Lyon Bowley. Collected in A. C. Pigou, 1966, Memorials of Alfred Marshall, pp. 427-428.

“I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics: and I went more and more on the rules

  1. Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than an engine of inquiry.
  2. Keep to them till you have done.
  3. Translate into English.
  4. Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life.
  5. Burn the mathematics.
  6. If you can’t succeed in (4), burn (3).

This last I did often.”

We may not have burned as much of the mathematics as we ought to have done, but we try to restrain the mathematics to when it is most necessary. For the most part, the economics is conveyed through graphical intuition accompanied by algebra. All of the graphics are also available on github (see Simon Halliday’s github repo bfh-textbook). As you can see in the supplementary materials above, we have provided interactive graphics based on these figures produced by Bridget Diana and based on work by Chris Makler, whose work at econgraphs.org we recommend both for us with our book and for use in other courses using other books.

We cover Lagrangians in a set of mathematics notes and in the mathematical appendix.

Course Materials

Once we have provided you with draft chapters of the book, Simon will share a Google drive folder with you that contains slide decks, problem sets, quizzes, worksheets, etc. Simon has test-taught the book at Smith College and much of this content is based on the course he taught. Draft chapters of the book have been taught in a variety of universities and colleges in China, India, Ireland, Germany, Japan, South Africa, the US, the UK, and elsewhere.

Multiple-choice questions and mathematical questions

The interactive e-book contains embedded multiple-choice questions so students can test their understanding while they read as well as mathematical questions to test understanding of some of the mathematical and modeling concepts in the book. These are also available as PDFs with solutions (for the math questions) and MSWord documents and PDFs (for the MCQs). There are additional resources available for instructors once an instructor creates a login through the OUP website.

Pedagogical Approach

Our objective is not simply to teach students “how economists think” by algorithmic training using toy models, but to to teach economics as a social science: an inquiry into the main challenges our society faces and the policy options available to us to confront the challenges.

To do this we begin each chapter with one or more empirical puzzles or historical episodes that economic theory should be able to illuminate. Models are taught as a way of addressing real world problems and questions.

Our approach is informed by the latest ideas in the learning sciences. See, for example, Brown, Roediger and McDaniel, 2014, Make It Stick, Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA.